This article examines how upward mobility affects both class and ethnic social positioning of Mapuche indigenous people in Chile. The article builds on cultural class analysis dominated by Bourdieusian approaches, suggesting the incorporation of an intersectional and postcolonial lens, considering the ways in which ethnicity complicates classed trajectories, focusing on class mobility and indigeneity. Drawing on 40 life history interviews of first-generation Mapuche professionals, the analysis reveals complex and varied responses to social mobility. The interviewees display three groups of responses: the ‘mobile-accommodators’, embracing deracinated middle-class identities; the ‘rooted’, asserting connections with working-class and Mapuche origins; and the ‘resignifiers’, embracing a more ambivalent class identity, but articulating a strong sense of Mapuche identity. The experience of upward social mobility represents a challenge to the respondents’ sense of class position, class and ethnic identities, as they have had to manage indigenous identity claims across their social origins and destinations.
The article aims to cover a gap in research, including an ethnic dimension to explore the relationship between people’s trajectories and their experiences at university. Drawing on a retrospective life-story approach, the article compares how 55 respondents of different social origins recount both their routes to university and their experiences at university. By adopting an intersectional lens of analysis, we argue that differential experiences at university affect people’s trajectories of social mobility. Data from two qualitative studies are analysed in this article to explore how class and ethnic background, but also people’s location in urban or rural areas and other aspects of their family situation, affected their educational routes to earning a university place. We argue for the subjective experience of social mobility as a process of achievement, but one fraught with numerous obstacles and challenges. This article shows that respondents from working-class social backgrounds encounter different barriers because of the lack of socioeconomic resources, previous educational disadvantages, class/ethnic discrimination, and family cultural background. Meanwhile, respondents from middle-class and upper-class backgrounds have to face different issues related to their families’ expectations of maintaining their social status. Based on those findings, we suggest that research on social mobility needs to consider multiple and intersectional dimensions that frame an individual’s life trajectories, instead of focusing on movements between fixed educational or occupational positions.
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